Techmeme
April 9, 2024, 6:15 PM

Top News

Wall Street Journal:
Google unveils ARM-based Axion chips for AI, claiming they have up to 30% better performance over the top ARM rivals, coming to Google Cloud customers in 2024  —  Tech giant develops new chips to cut reliance on outside vendors as the AI arms race intensifies
Bloomberg:
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian unveils AI updates: corporate Gemini users can “ground” responses in reliable sources, Search as a Gemini answer source, and more  —  The company unveiled updates to its AI offerings at its annual cloud conference  —  Google unveiled a host …
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Google details Workspace updates: Gmail's “instant polish” to turn rough notes into emails, tabs in Docs, Gemini in Chat, “Translate for me” in Meet, and more  —  Besides Vids, Google Workspace is getting a slew of new features and Gemini capabilities at Cloud Next 2024.
David Pierce / The Verge:
Google announces Vids, an app to help companies and consumers make collaborative, shareable video, powered by Gemini, launching in public beta in summer 2024  —  For decades, work has revolved around documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks.  Word, Excel, PowerPoint; Pages, Numbers, Keynote; Docs, Sheets, Slides.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Automattic acquires Beeper, a source says for $125M, and absorbs its 27 employees; Beeper co-founder Eric Migicovsky will become Automattic's head of messaging  —  - Automattic purchases Beeper in $125 million deal; CEO to join  — Beeper briefly brought Apple's iMessage to Android devices
Paul Alcorn / Tom's Hardware:
Intel debuts Gaudi 3, set for Q3 mass production, claiming up to 1.7x the training performance, 50% more inference, and 40% better efficiency than Nvidia's H100  —  GPUs fall the wayside as Intel goes all-in on Gaudi for AI.  —  Intel made a slew of announcements during its Vision 2024 event today …
Malcolm Owen / AppleInsider:
Apple researchers publish a paper on Ferret-UI, a multimodal LLM tailored for enhanced understanding of mobile UI screens  —  Apple's Ferret LLM could help allow Siri to understand the layout of apps in an iPhone display, potentially increasing the capabilities of Apple's digital assistant.
Zack Whittaker / TechCrunch:
Researchers found an exposed Azure server with credentials used by Microsoft staff to access internal systems; Microsoft was told Feb. 6 and secured it March 5  —  Microsoft has resolved a security lapse that exposed internal company files and credentials to the open internet.
More: Neowin
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch:
Cruise resumes manually driving its vehicles without autonomous systems engaged to create maps and gather road information in select cities, starting in Phoenix  —  General Motors' Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post.
Leo Schwartz / Fortune:
Monad Labs, which is building a Layer 1 blockchain to rival Ethereum and Solana, raised $225M led by Paradigm and plans to launch its mainnet by the end of 2024  —  With crypto markets roaring back, different blockchains are jockeying to become the solution that hoovers up demand in the next wave …
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Quora-owned AI chatbot platform Poe now allows bot creators to set a per-message price for their bots and rolls out enhanced analytics dashboard for creators  —  Bot creators now have a new way to make money with Poe, the Quora-owned AI chatbot platform.  On Monday, the company introduced …
Wall Street Journal:
An investigation finds a shadowy supply chain for Starlink terminals to US foes in Russia and Sudan via Africa, Asia, and the UAE; SpaceX has not shut them off  —  The satellite-internet devices are helping Russian fighters in Ukraine and paramilitary forces in Sudan; SpaceX hasn't shut them off
Alexandra Alper / Reuters:
Sources: the US plans to award Samsung $6B+ next week to build four chip facilities in Taylor, Texas, including a $17B plant, as part of the $52.7B CHIPS Act  —  The Biden administration plans to announce it is awarding more than $6 billion to South Korea's Samsung (005930.KS) …
Sam Sabin / Axios:
Alethea, whose ML service monitors online chatter to help companies detect disinformation, raised a $20M Series B by GV, bringing its total raised to $34M  —  - Heading into the 2024 U.S. elections, the funding will help the company boost its staff levels and build its product to spot and detect foreign disinformation campaigns online.
LinkedIn: Jake Seid

Sponsor Posts

Meta:
Open Source AI: Available to all, not just the few  —  Meta's open source AI enables small businesses, start-ups, students, researchers and more to download and build with our models at no cost.
Tribe AI:
Build AI products that matter  —  Tribe AI helps organizations rapidly deploy AI solutions that have real business impact.  We bring together world class AI talent and tooling to drive differentiated results.
Zoho:
Passkeys Week for a passwordless future: Learn how Zoho is embracing passkeys  —  Passkeys are the modern-day alternative authentication method that was introduced to replace traditional passwords for enhanced security and convenience.
Hamming:
Make AI Voice Agents trustworthy  —  Hamming AI automatically tests AI voice agents and continuously monitors them in production.
Techmeme Ride Home:
Mon. 11/18 - More Smartglasses On The Horizon
The day's tech news, every day at 5pm ET. Fifteen minutes and you're up to date.
Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 6:15 PM ET, April 9, 2024.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Mark Bergen / Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Kate Knibbs / Wired:
Kaya Yurieff / The Information:
Jaspreet Singh / Reuters:
Abner Li / 9to5Google:
Paul Sawers / TechCrunch: